Friday, 9 August 2013

I was at a gathering recently when a medical expert was brought to talk on personal hygiene.
He gave the normal and expected rules except for that regarding the ear.
According to him, cleaning the ear is bad and even harmful to the ear. I went on further research to see if such a claim was true. I ended up googling it up and discovered its validity--its true.
According toThe Telegraph:
“In most circumstances, wax is actually beneficial to the ear,” says Simon Baer, a consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon at the Conquest Hospital in Hastings.“It causes foreign bodies to adhere to it, preventing them from going further into the ear, and it has anti-bacterial properties. Removing it is like taking the wax off the surfaceof polished wooden furniture.It makes the delicate underlying skin of the ear more susceptible to infection.”
Of course, some people have way too much earwax, but that’s rare. Certainly not common enough to support the huge earwax removal industry.

“There’s no need to clean your ears with a cotton bud,” writes Dr. Rob Hicks. “The ear has its own internal cleaning mechanism. Fats and oils in the ear canal trap any particles and transport them out of the ear as wax. This falls out of the ear without us noticing.”
Besides, ear wax isn’t dirt. It’s supposed to be there.